"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"for 24 May 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Hit & Run 05.24.01

Hit & Run XXXV
Add this groundbreaking event to
an ever-growing list of Internet
firsts: the Internet
"Synchro-Meal," in which "people
all over the world will prepare
the exact same meal and sit down
'together,' linked by Internet
Relay Chat."
Five years ago today in Suck.

Kaycee Nicole died twice last week, first of an aneurysm, then of exposure.
Well known in the weblog community for her
journal chronicling life with leukemia, Kaycee was a
nineteen-year-old
beautiful spirit 
enthusiastic, hopeful, loving and, um, not actually real.
Invented by a woman
claiming to be her mother, Kaycee, her site and every communication she had
with dozens of people  including phone calls, e-mail, instant messages, and
care packages  were faked, in a hoax years-long and fathoms deep. On the
Internet, nobody knows you're healthy.

The
episode raises a
host of thorny issues involving community, anonymity, self, identity theft
and trust  the typical post-brouhaha philosophizing  but actually
addressing them sounds like a lot of work. So instead, we'll just note that
there's a small ray of hope for the Internet if someone is willing to put
hundreds or thousands of hours into a lie without ever making a dime off it.
With the collapse of the bubble, we were afraid that kind of
creativity/outright fraud had been chased off the Web.

Of course, where there are suckers, there's a business plan, and just
because Kaycee's "mom" didn't see fit to exploit that fact doesn't mean
others won't. Rather than being indignant, the Kaycee beta testers should
consider themselves lucky  they got to experience the very latest in
immersive marketing ahead of the rush. Forget
Evan Chan and A.I. and their
little tail-chasing game: Kaycee had more emotional resonance, a better
mystery and the ultimate in reality-based drama  people who didn't even
know
they were involved.

For all the lamentations that have followed the collapse of
Kaycee's story, we can't help but think it, or something very close to it,
is the future of marketing. A middle-aged woman with an Internet connection
pulled off the sort of intimate attachment with a brand that major
corporations would  you'll excuse the expression  die for. Kaycee may be
dead, but her legacy is just beginning.

"The challenge, for them, goes beyond merely coping with the Silicon Valley swoon,"
writes the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, in his
parable of the disappointed tech writers. "It is watching paper fortunes disappear, neighborhoods change, employers go belly-up, friends get tossed out of work  and wondering whether they, in ways large and small, became part of one of history's great hype machines." We considered ourselves duly fingered and justly
chastened; but our sources assure us Howard Kurtz is part of
the biggest hype machine since Pravda. He operates a
big bellows down in the kitchen, or so they say.

Even if we never mastered the art of making money, Suck can go safely
out of business knowing we never lost our knack for making enemies.
Here's one recent report from everybody's favorite Suck reader,
Humberto:

Hey Sucksters,

Netslaves' Steve Gilliard took some time off from playing
investigative
reporter (revealing to the world that dot-com failures have gaspshoddy fundamentals)
to present
his own take
on the
"Where did the 4 Trillion go?" question presented by Suck a few
weeks ago. As an intro, he decided to direct some of his trademark outrage at
Suck:

"A "satirical" Web site posted a story recently where they asked where
did
the trillions, that's right, trillions, with a T, have gone...This
website
thought this was another chance to make a funny, and I would agree with
them, until I start thinking about a couple who invested thousands in
Critical Path. Like most of the boom IT companies, its real worth as a
public company is a fraction of what it was at its height. The
punchline:
the husband has cancer and may die at his desk because they lost that
money. So I don't think it's a goddamn bit funny."

I don't know if he also feels the same "not a goddamn bit funny"
outrage
towards Satirewire and Fuckedcompany or any other publication that
employs
a bit of dark humor with regard to dot-coms. Gilliard himself appears
to
repeatedly violate the "no humor near tragedy" rule with his lukewarm
attempts at "making a funny" within his reporting. Maybe the problem is
that he thinks that you Sucksters are living it up, and thus have no
right
to make fun of the crisis.

Says Gilliard, "Of course, the owners of said Web site won't be
missing
any meals. We'd say their name, but there's no point in it. If you read
the
story, you know and if you didn't, it doesn't matter."

Not naming the site seems like an odd choice coming from a writer who
has
spent the last couple of months pointing fingers and naming names on
Netslaves. Later on, Gilliard writes "That money didn't just get up and
walk away. It is in banks, in offshore accounts, in real companies,
while
stockholders are left holding a very empty bag." His accounting of
where
the money is includes a laundry list of the usual culprits, CEO's,
VC's,
and brokerages along with expense accounts, perks, and Aeron chairs.
While
a lot of real money undoubtedly burned up in those places, Gilliard
omitted
an important detail. When the Suck story originally ran,
astute readers quickly pointed out that much of that 4 Trillion consisted of
never capitalized imaginary gains.

In the Netslaves discussion thread that follows, Gilliard mentions the
Nazi atrocities that led up to the Nuremberg trial and hints that they
are
preparing their own trial: "It will take months to work up to the full
out
show trial which is needed. We will be making a full case before we
expand
the site's offerings. It will be our final, exclusively job-related
offering. Depending on if we're eating or not, we will pull together
the
documents, name the names and find the guilty using their own words."
(on another occasion, as
I recall, Gilliard compared Esther Dyson and Howard Rheingold to Robert
McNamara, so the war crimes comparisons aren't unexpected).

Recently, Netslaves changed its tagline from "Horror Tales of Working
the
Web" to "Undertakers of the New Economy". Fitting, given the number of
people actually working the web right now, but if they're supposed to
be
the undertakers of the new economy, they're not doing a very good job
of
it. Why am I telling you all this? Well, any case of Suck-dissing
deserves
mention, but one by a Plastic partner warrants it a bit more. They need
a
good slap. Maybe Tim can whip up an H&R bit about them. As I see it,
the
gauntlet is on the floor.

Maybe it's just that, as we find more and more often these days, we couldn't
have said it better than Humberto anyway. Maybe we're just tired. But
Gilliard's assault is so pathetic, his Rumpelstilstkin tantrum
so obviously more a symptom than a cause, that we wouldn't feel right
responding. Desperate times may or may not bring about desperate measures,
but it's for damn sure they bring about desperate theories, and Gilliard's
combination of bogus populist pique and old-fashioned
stab in the back theory is a perfect indicator of our own panic-ridden times. First a
conspiracy of office furniture salesmen, venture capitalists and the Trilateral
Commission moves $4 trillion into numbered bank accounts in the Cayman
Islands. Then an elite group of scoundrels apparently headed by Suck lives
it up by ripping off the marrow of the laboring classes. And now it appears
that Suck has the power to give people cancer. This may not explain much
about the state of the market, but it's the kind of talk that gets more shrill
and frequent when you see the end approaching, when
everybody you know is getting laid off or going out of business,
and you're just sure somebody must be responsible for this mess.
Indeed, Gilliard's intemperate talk of Nazis and Nuremberg may be
appropriate in a sense, but he's applying it to the wrong people. Here we
all are in the last days, cowering in the bunker as the Russians close in,
waiting for our numbers to
come up, and listening to the ever more fanciful ravings of madmen. Which
is why we're not angry, or even surprised, by Gilliard's attack. It's a sign
our chaotic times. At any
minute, any one of us could be promoted to Field Marshal or executed on the spot.